Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I crawl sideways, three feet away, before I dare look. He has landed mercifully, mercifully, on his belly. The hole in the wheat-bright back of his head is small, almost tidy. Lilah is still screaming, loud and strident, and now her scream is words, and the words are, “No, Mirabelle! No, Mirabelle, no!” Her face is speckled in bright crimson, and under her cries I hear the rising sound of sirens coming.

  The porch fills up with nervous dogs, all milling. Cesar adds in barking, so the yard is a cacophony of ugly sounds. I lean forward, crawl a few feet to get my mouth closer to Thom’s ear.

  “Baby?” I say. “Baby?”

  There is no answer. There is no Thom.

  “Shut up, Lilah,” my mother says, and then more harshly, “Shut up, dog!” Lilah obeys, but there is no stopping Cesar. I look at my mother because it’s better than looking at Thom. A thousand times better. My mother says to me, over Cesar’s noise, “I couldn’t have you leaving, Rose Mae.”

  “Now you’ll have to leave,” I say.

  “Oh, that’s all right, then,” she says. “I’m used to that.”

  Sirens and running feet and the endless yap of Cesar are breaking the air. Neighbors are appearing in their bathrobes, coming to stand in shocked clusters in the street.

  I hear running feet behind me, and a man and then a woman come to the gate and yell words. The man says, “Put it down.” And the woman says, to me, I think, “Ma’am?… Ma’am? Are you shot?”

  My mother has Pawpy’s old gun pointed down between her feet, threatening only the flower bed I’ve ruined. I see one of Thom’s big boot prints in the center of the churned earth.

  “It’s fine,” my mother says to the police behind me. “I’m finished.”

  She sets Pawpy’s gun down carefully on the porch edge, and the man cop comes running through the gate to grab her and turn her and chain her bad hands.

  The woman kneels beside me. “Is any of this your blood?” she asks. She is searching my body.

  “I need to go to the hospital,” I say.

  She says, more frantically, “Is this your blood?”

  “I think my mother roofied me,” I say.

  The woman cop grabs my shoulders, says insistently, “Is any of this blood yours?”

  I lift my hand to touch my face in wonder, and it comes away smeared in red.

  “No,” I tell her. “I think I lived.”

  Nobody is more surprised than me.

  EPILOGUE

  I STEP OFF THE BART train and hear the doors swish shut behind me. I’ve come to understand the train system here, very quickly. It’s easier to take them than to risk losing the parking place I finally scored for the Bug on Belgria Street. I walk back toward my mother’s house in the fading Cali sunshine. The salt air is getting chilly on my bare arms and my toes. Ivy’s boots have been taken away. They are in separate plastic bags in an evidence locker somewhere downtown. I’ve bought myself a pair of walking sandals.

  I see the “bull daggahhh!” shouter coming down the road toward me, his wild braids sticking up in a haggle from his head wrap. He is a local fixture, and I have come to feel a strange affection for him.

  “Hey, Walter,” I call to him. He grunts, but he has no message for me today. As I pass, he stops and unzips, turning to pee in Mrs. Delgado’s rosebushes. I don’t so much as blink. The Berkeley attitude seems to be that everyone has to pee somewhere, and I am going native.

  Perhaps he is leaving a message for Gretel in the only language she can read. Later I’ll come out walking with her, and I’ll pack a soft lunch—peanut-butter sandwich, some fudge, a ripe banana—in case he is still around.

  I reach the fence around my mother’s house. All along the outside edge of it there are bunches of flowers, six or seven of them, in various states of decay. It’s like a shrine where someone died, but I don’t think they are for Thom. I find them there a couple of mornings a week. I leave them be until they are unquestionably dead, then clear them to make room for the new ones.

  Parker is sitting on the porch steps, swamped in dogs. He waves as I come in the gate, and all four come galloping to greet me, my own Gret leading the charge. I wade through them, patting heads and scratching ears. Even Cesar has decided to be glad to see me. I ease myself down and sit on the other side of the stairs. The dogs station themselves between us, like a herd of furry chaperones.

  When I was in the hospital, Parker was my first and only visitor. I fell asleep in the ambulance, my mother’s potent antianxiety and sleeping meds still in my system, but he was by my bed with field daisies and a worried face when I woke up.

  “So it’s Rose,” he said. “Not Ivy, huh?”

  “They’re both plants,” I told him, yawning. “But I’m a flower, as it turns out. Next time, you should bring me candy.”

  He grinned at me, an easy upturn of his lips, and I smiled back at him and thought, Not now. Not even soon. But there is going to be a next time. I was glad to learn he’d missed seeing the carnage in his yard. By the time he got home from his job, it was down to yellow tape, some stains, and a tech in a jumpsuit who told him what had happened and where to find me.

  “How is she?” he asks me now.

  “Good,” I say. “Jail is not a bad place for an agoraphobic. Where’s she gonna go, right?”

  It took a long time, almost a week, before they’d let me come sit in a plastic chair and see my mother through a wall of glass. She told her lawyer not to bother asking for bail.

  “Did you tell her I’m going to come see her on Wednesday?”

  I nod. “We met with her lawyer. He’s still hammering out details with the DA, but he told us where he thinks they’ll end up. She’ll take the deal.”

  “Second degree,” he says, and whistles out between his teeth. “That’s a lot of years.”

  I shrug. My mother has left me again, but we are both fine with it. She seems to think that we are even. Me, I have a different take.

  I tell Parker, “She doesn’t care about the time, if the DA will agree to send her to a jail that’s close enough for her friends and me to visit. Neither side wants to go to trial. A case like this, when the deceased is… not the world’s best citizen, the jury could spook and let her go. On our side, we don’t want them to put first degree on the menu. Juries are crazy.”

  “I don’t think they could get first,” Parker says.

  I shake my head, less certain. They found me on the lawn, after all, newly baptized in my husband’s blood. Three neighbors saw my mother gun him down execution style, putting one through the back of the head. More came running when they heard the shot. Only Lilah, that loyal little liar-pants, was close enough to see he was an imminent threat, and she oversold it. The Thom she invented was screaming that he’d come to kill me, slashing at the air with a mysterious vanishing knife.

  My medical records have helped, my mother’s lawyer told me. My old nemesis, that yogurt-breathed nurse from the Amarillo ER, was beyond delighted to give a statement. But Thom was unarmed and only walking slowly toward me, according to the neighbors. My mother did not call a warning or ask him to stop. Not even Lilah thought to invent that.

  Most damning of all, some vigorous cop or another checked phone records. He found the late-night call to Thom’s home made from the West Branch Berkeley library’s outside pay phone. There was a quarter in the change case with my mother’s perfect thumbprint on it. The DA seems to think that proves premeditation, and a jury might believe it. It’s not a risk her lawyer cares to take. Not in a death penalty state.

  The DA does not know that it was never my mother’s plan to kill Thom Grandee. Her own lawyer doesn’t know it. Her silence on the subject tells me she believes that I don’t know it, either.

  But I’ve seen through her. If my mother planned to kill him, Thom Grandee would have died before I ever heard them fighting. My mother called 911 with the cordless phone. She had the connection open, the phone hidden on the chair seat under the reading table, before he even walked into her h
ouse.

  My mother planned a murder all right, but not my husband’s. Killing Thom was useless to her. If he was dead, there was still no guarantee that I would stay. The only murder my mother ever planned was her own.

  Her lawyer played the 911 tape for me. It’s pretty clear to me that she is goading him. She’s telling him I’m being hidden by the Saint Cecilias, saying in loud, smug tones that they took me away on a private boat and he’ll never find me. She is careful to clearly state his whole name for the 911 operator several times, even once calling him “Thom Grandee of Amarillo, Texas.” She’s identifying her killer, right before the fact, in case he leaves before the police arrive to catch him with her body. The 911 tape ends as I come down the stairs. She landed on the phone and accidentally broke the connection when Thom shoved her over the table.

  Her plan is clear to me, though: Thom goes to jail forever. I am free to walk. She is free to never see me leaving.

  Her only mistake was in underestimating his travel time. She should have given me more Ativan. I woke up and interrupted before he had time to kill her.

  Parker waves his hand in front of my face, saying, “Where’d you go?”

  I blink and shake my head. “I was just thinking,” I say. “I want to put a lemon tree in the backyard.”

  He laughs. “You can try. But I doubt it will survive the amount of dog pee it is sure to be subjected to.”

  My mother’s lawyer finds it strange that I am still living here in this apartment, after what I witnessed. He doesn’t understand that I’ve shared space with living violence for most of my years on this earth. I sleep just fine with the ghost of it in the yard. Besides, this is the least I can give her, a mental picture of me living in her house, filling up that empty hole of a room.

  Really, though, I’ve moved over into hers. It’s bigger and it has a ceiling fan, and she won’t be needing it for years and years and years. Next week, I plan to cover the furniture and paint the walls a thick, rich butter color. I’ll stay, but I’m done with all her blue.

  As long as she can think I’m tucked into the twin bed she placed just so to hold me, she will sleep perfectly fine in prison. It’s a gift I am giving her in secret, because I do not think now that we are even. I think the scales the blindfolded gypsy holds have tilted. I may owe her a little something.

  “Want to go get some dinner?” Parker asks.

  “Tomorrow?” I say. “I have something to do tonight.”

  “Okay,” Parker says. “I should grade papers anyway.” He starts to get up.

  “Do me a favor?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says.

  “Leave the porch light off?” He gives me a long, level stare. “And maybe lock the dog door once your crew is in?”

  “Sure,” he says again.

  I sit out on the porch, and it gets cooler and darker. When I go in to get a jacket, I bring Gretel inside for the night. I want the yard dog-free for when Lilah comes to bring the flowers.

  Parker steps back out onto the porch a couple of hours into my vigil, bearing a flat bowl of brown rice and shrimp and stir-fried vegetables. He sits down beside me and says, “Can I wait with you?”

  “I’d like that.” He’s figured out my mission. I hope he doesn’t mind it. I ask him, straight up, “Are you okay with this? It is your house, and considering the history…”

  “I think it’s great,” he says, and hands me the bowl. He’s put chopsticks in, the optimist. The man’s still in denial that I’m from Ala-got-damn-bama. I pass them to him with an arched brow, and he pulls an emergency backup fork out of his jacket pocket. I find myself gobbling—the man can cook—then set the bowl aside. We wait quietly together. We’re getting good at it. It’s a comfortable thing, all the waiting we’ve been doing. I feel a good, expectant happiness moving up behind it. It won’t go on much longer, I don’t think.

  It’s after midnight when we finally hear her creeping down the street. Parker stays still, but I stand and step silently across the yard to meet her at the gate.

  Lilah steps into the light from one of Belgria’s bright streetlamps. She stands at the fence like Moses gazing into the Promised Land. Her left arm is in a sling. Her right arm is full of tulips.

  She hears me coming out of the dark yard when I am a few feet away. We have not seen each other since the shooting.

  “Hi,” I say. I am on my side of the fence, but the streetlamp spills enough light into the yard for her to see me.

  She looks flushed, embarrassed.

  “You’re her daughter, they told me,” she says. “Her real one.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “They tell me that, too.”

  Lilah nods. “I shoulda known. You look like her around the mouth.” She leans down to set her tulips by the fence.

  “I told her about the flowers, Lilah. Tulips are one of her favorites.” I have no idea if that’s true, but the information seems to please her, and I’m pleased, too. I’m learning how to lie to women. Or girls, anyway. She can’t be more than twenty-three or-four. Her jawline still has a baby softness to it. “It’s chilly out, and your house is not a good place to be living. You should come inside.”

  Her gaze flicks back to me, her eyes impassive. “I’m not allowed back in.”

  “Mirabelle’s not home,” I say. “She’s not coming home. Not anytime soon.”

  “I know.” Lilah’s eyes fill up with tears. “She made me soup. No one has ever been nice to me like she was. I blew my chance, but she was so nice to me that I never thought she wouldn’t give me another.”

  I nod. “Yes, you blew it. With her. You haven’t blown it with me.” I can’t read her expression. “You need to leave your husband, Lilah, and your room is standing empty.” Still, she says nothing. “I can try to be nice. I know how to make soup.” She doesn’t crack a smile. I walk down the fence a few feet, open the gate. “Okay. Maybe not today. I’ll leave it empty, you understand? As long as it takes. I’m not Mirabelle, looking for a herd of lost sheep. I’m saying that the room belongs to you. It will always be ready for you. Clean sheets and empty drawers for your pajamas. Just yours.”

  She looks away, a shy gesture, as if she is not sure what the right answer is. I walk away, across the yard. Parker has gone inside. I am not even back to the porch steps when I hear the gate closing. I turn around, and Lilah is inside it. I grin at her and wait at the steps. We go inside together.

  “I’m real tired,” she says.

  “Go on up, then,” I say. “My stuff is in Mirabelle’s old room, if you want to borrow a nightie. Borrow anything you like. Tomorrow, we’ll start making plans.”

  She hesitates, but only for a moment, and then she goes on up the stairs. I wonder if it will bother her to find I’ve moved all the furniture in her room around.

  I stand in what is still my mother’s downstairs. I’ve taken her palm reader’s sign down, but I still need to clear out her store. I’ll pack away the inventory or maybe have a mystical garage sale. This very week, I will put in a full-size sofa, paint the kitchen red, and buy a television and a radio to break the over-Zenned silence. Then it will be my apartment, and that’s as far as I have gotten. There will be time for plans tomorrow, like I said to Lilah, and more time the day after that.

  I go upstairs and undress, pulling on a clean T-shirt. It is strange to sleep alone in a queen-size bed after years of marriage. My mother has a puffy duvet, very snuggly, and I call Gret up from the foot and let her under. I feel like a little girl, tucked into my mother’s bedding with an illicit dog. Her rule was always that Leroy could sleep with me, but not under the covers.

  Down the hall, Lilah is tucked safe into a child’s bed. For now, anyway. For tonight.

  I wonder who we’ll both grow up to be.

  gods in Alabama

  CHAPTER 1

  There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to
the roaches.

  I made a deal with God two years before I left there. At the time, I thought He made out pretty well. I offered Him a three-for-one-deal: All He had to do was perform a miracle. He fulfilled His end of the bargain, so I kept my three promises faithfully, no matter what the cost. I held our deal as sacred for twelve solid years. But that was before God let Rose Mae Lolley show up on my doorstep, dragging my ghosts and her own considerable baggage with her.

  It was the week before summer vacation began, and my uncle Bruster was getting ready to retire. He’d been schlepping the mail up and down Route 19 for thirty years and now, finally, he was going to get a gold watch, a shitty pension, and the federal government’s official permission to die. His retirement party was looming, and my aunt Florence was using it as the catalyst for her latest campaign to get me home. She launched these crusades three or four times a year, usually prompted by major holidays or family events.

  I had already explained multiple times to Mama that I wasn’t coming. I shouldn’t have had to explain it at all. I had not gone back to Possett since I graduated from high school in ’87. I had stayed in Chicago for nine Christmas vacations, had not come home for nine spring breaks, had faithfully signed up to take or teach classes every summer quarter for ten years. I had avoided weekend fly-downs for the births, graduation ceremonies, and weddings of various cousins and second cousins. I had even claimed exemption from attending the funerals of my asshole grampa and his wife, Saint Granny.

  At this point, I figured I had firmly established that I would not be coming home, even if all of Chicago was scheduled to be consumed by the holy flames of a vengeful Old Testament–style Lord. “Thanks for the invite, Mama,” I would say, “but I have plans to be burned up in a fire that weekend.” Mama, however, could wipe a conversation out of her mind an infinite number of times and come back to the topic fresh as a daisy the next time we spoke.

  Burr had his feet propped up on my battered coffee table and was reading a legal thriller he had picked up at the grocery store. In between an early movie and a late supper, we had dropped by my place to intercept Florence’s eight o’clock call. Missing it was not an option. I called Aunt Florence every Sunday after church, and every Wednesday night, Flo parked my mother by the phone and dialed my number. I wouldn’t put it past Florence to hire a team of redneck ninjas to fly up to Chicago and take me down if she ever got my answering machine.